2001-01-27 - 23:59:24

General Grant's Last Stand

The other day Lily was watching Gone With the Wind on television. It's one of her favorite movies and she's seen it several times before. For my part I've never seen the movie all the way though - only bits and pieces of it.

Lily was watching the part about the burning of Atlanta by the Yankees, a part that I'd never seen before. Lily remarked how terribly cruel it was for the North to do such a thing, and I explained the strategy of Sherman's March to the Sea to her. The point of it was to bring the war to the heart of the South, to make her suffer. It was the only way to break the incredible pride of the South and make her surrender.

On the one hand, the movie amply showed the almost limitless pride and arrogance of some Southerners ("We'll beat the Yankees in a week!") but on the other hand the points of strategy pale beneath the terrible suffering wrought on the South. It literally took them a century to fully recover from the effects of the Civil War.

All of this had me thinking about my last little brush with the history of that era.

I've been a fan of Civil War history ever since I was in Junior High, in fact one of our family vacations in those days (while we were still a family) was to the Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania.

Actually, these days my brother Harry is even more keen on history than I am. Recently when he has been coming up to visit the two of us have been playing tourist, visiting nearby historical sites.

One place that I've always wanted to visit is Mount McGregor, just a couple hours north of Frown Town. On the mountain is the cabin where general and former President Ulysses S. Grant spent his last days.

I've tried to visit the site twice before, once with my father 20 years ago and once with Harry more recently, but both times the house was closed. It seemed to keep very weird hours. Finally, a few months ago, Harry and I got to view the place, and it was one of the most eerie and gothic experiences of my life.

But first, a little background...

Probably most of you know that U.S. Grant was the major general for the North during the Civil War, and was subsequently the 18th President of the United States.

Grant was a short, unprepossessing man who seemed doomed to a life of failure until the Civil War came along. He quickly rose from obscurity to the head of the biggest Union army simply because all his predecessors had either been inept or afraid to fight.

When I was younger, I did a lot of reading on Grant, and I could fill pages and pages with what I still remember, but I'll settle for one famous anecdote.

As the future commander-in-chief was progressing through the ranks, there were rumors that Grant, a former alcoholic, was drinking again. When a delegation to President Lincoln accused Grant of drinking on duty, Lincoln responded with: "I can't say whether Grant is a drinking man or not, but if he is, I should like to know where he buys his liquor as I wish to present each one of my army commanders with a barrel of the same brand."

Anyway, after the war Grant was considered a big hero by the North and was easily elected President in 1868. Sad to say, he was not as good a president as he was a general - his administration was plagued with scandals and blunders.

Grant's main problem was that he was too trusting. This got him into trouble after he left office, too. In the mid-1880s he and his son Fred got hoodwinked by a Wall Street swindler who took them for nearly everything they had. After this, the Grant family was close to financial ruin.

It was author and publisher Mark Twain who gave Grant a way out of his financial difficulties: he offered Grant a generous advance and promise of royalties to write his memoirs.

Grant began dictating his memoirs to a secretary, but a persistent sore throat began to plague the general. It got so bad he went to visit the doctor, and got a terrible diagnosis: he had inoperable throat cancer. It would now be a race against time to finish the proposed two books.

Soon after this Grant's voice gave out and he had to write the rest of the book out longhand. He managed to finish it barely a week before he died on July 23, 1885. Showing great courage, the old general had won his last battle for the sake of his family.

That was about all I knew about Grant's last days until I visited Mount McGregor myself. Late last Spring Harry drove up from downstate and the two of us visited the historical site. To our total astonishment it was actually open.

Mount McGregor is pretty far off the beaten path. We followed a winding road that crept up the side of a mountain, through thick woods. The fact that it was a cold, drizzly day only added to the gloom. It was then we got a surprise: around a bend in the road we found a checkpoint with an armed guard.

Apparently Grant's Cottage was located right next to a prison. This fact was underlined when we had to pass through a second checkpoint with another armed guard. AT both checkpoints Harry and I were sternly warned to not stop for any reason and not venture far away from the cottage.

We thought all these warning were pretty funny, until we got farther up the mountain. There was indeed a prison at the top of the mountain, a looming, rambling fort-like structure with huge walls made of dark, ancient-looking stone. If Edgar Allen Poe had designed a prison, it probably would have looked a lot like this.

Following the walls for a ways, we finally broke into a clearing and there was Grant's Cottage. It was sitting, quite literally, in the shadow of the prison, dwarfed by the dank walls looming over it. Understandably this made it not terribly popular as a tourist destination: in the whole time we were there we only saw two other cars.

It was called "Grant's Cottage," but it was what anyone would call a full size house. In fact it had the look of a small resort hotel, circa 1880.

The Cottage was pained a bright yellow color, but once we got close to it, we could see that it could use a repainting. However, that was nothing compared to what it looked like inside.

Picture, in your mind's eye, what an elegant summer house would look like, circa 1885. Imagine the tasteful floral wallpaper, the elegant furnishings, the fashionably high ceilings. Now imagine what it would look like 115 years later if nobody had touched a thing. Nobody had replaced the carpets or the wallpaper, or even changed the sheets on the beds. Everything in the house was faded and badly in need of restoration.

The sad fact was that the owners of the cottage had wanted to preserve the house as a shrine to Grant's last days, but they hadn’t had the money to really keep the place up. That also explained the prison looming over the house: when money got tight they had sold the land surrounding the cottage to the U.S. Government.

The only modern thing about the cottage was that some clumsy amateur electrician had wired the building for light. There were thick, black electrical wires running along the ceilings and each room had one naked incandescent light bulb hanging down in the middle of it. This barely dispelled the mid-afternoon gloom, but it was better than if the original gas lamps had been in place.

Much of the original things were still there to be seen. Grant's reading glasses, the wheelchair he sat in, even the notes he wrote to his neighbors and his doctors were on display, many of them framed on the wall.

Also on the wall were many photographic mementos - Grant and his family sitting on the porch of the house, Grant sitting all swaddled in blankets, writing his memoirs, and so on.

In spite of the evident age of the place, it gave a feeling of what life there must have been like in a way no book ever could.

Grant's last weeks at Mount McGregor were far from peaceful. Even though the location was somewhat remote, all sorts of curious people flocked from all over to see the house and its famous inhabitant. There were many photos of the cottage with all sorts of people hanging around outside. The crowds got especially bad when it was clear that Grant was going to die. In fact, Grant's death was probably the major news story of 1885, and the attending publicity around it was huge. Probably the owners of the house thought that this fame would last forever, but now the cottage is practically forgotten and full of browning, dusty curiosities.

Some of the attempts at preserving the moment seemed rather macabre. Someone had tried to save some of Grant's funeral wreaths by coating them in wax, and actually they had done a pretty good job. However the years had faded the actual flowers to very pale shadows of their former colors so now they only looked like bleached ghosts of flowers. Very creepy.

The actual bed that Grant died on is still laid out in the parlor. Still on it are the original sheet and bedspread, now yellow with age. Right in the middle of the bedspread is an ancient water stain, according to the tour guide they were left there by all the flowers that were heaped around the bed.

Not far from the house was an overlook called "Grant's Last View."

After Grant finished writing out the last of his memoirs and had sent them off to the publisher, he felt well enough for a little outing. He had heard that there was a spectacular view of the surrounding countryside nearby, so he decided to go see it. He had a special wheelchair that was more like a carriage, and so was taken down to the view in that. However, on the way back they decided to take a "short cut" and the carriage-wheelchair got stuck. Grant had to climb out of the wheelchair and walk for a ways, and this utterly exhausted him. This ordeal probably contributed to his death a few days later.

My brother Harry and I decided to make the half-mile walk to the view. There was a well-trodden path through the woods, but I could imagine a wheelchair having problems with it.

I have to say, though, that the view lived up to its hype - it was quite spectacular. The countryside for miles around was visible, with the local farms forming a crazy-quilt pattern. If the day had been clearer we could have seen all the way into Vermont.

Because the day was so damp, the grass seemed intensely green, and somehow the steep incline of the hill we were on gave the countryside a more-than-real appearance. Everything was green as far as the eye could see, but the ground below was very hilly. If I'd been the sort of person who was afraid of heights, the view might have given me vertigo.

You could see the modern highway far off in the distance, and that was the only evidence of modern life that was visible. The view probably looked much the same as it had when Grant was there.

What had the old general been thinking, looking down on all that green, restful farmland? Maybe he felt a quiet sense of satisfaction. In a very real way, he was partly responsible for the fact that all those farmers could till their fields and live their lives in peace.

The entire experience at Mount McGregor left me with oddly mixed feelings. Grant himself was something of a contradiction: a general who didn't like bloodshed and a man who was president mainly because other people wanted him to be. However, the main impression that I got from that moldering house is that there is nothing so monumental and important that the passage of time can't render it a mere curiosity: brown, faded and irrelevant.